Online Safety: A Whole Lot You Didin't Know

           The digital safety assignment was a good one. It covered a wide variety of topics and encouraged students to take charge of their own learning by researching and presenting the topics to their peers. To improve it, I would add a netiquette section and rearrange the topics so to make it clear that they are all very relevant to digital safety.

I feel for the most part, the 5 digital safety topics, cyber bullying, sexting and textual harassment, phishing and farming, copyright, and digital safety and privacy, fit well into a cohesive unit on digital safety. However, there are some things I would rearrange or remove. Firstly, I would make sure that all the topics address digital safety. I don’t think FUP and copyright law really apply to digital safety, at least not for users and not in the way it was presented. For it to apply to digital/online safety, I think it should be more about what rights we as educators/artists have and how to keep our work that we post online safe. One could say a great deal about what rights we do or do not have over pictures, documents, and video that we often haphazardly post online. I feel this would be more relevant to digital safety than copyright from the angle of whether or not the way we use the internet breaks copyright. However, that is an important issue.

I would add a section about netiquette into the cyber bullying topic, because it seems a lot of the cyber bullying could be avoided if we educate students on the proper way to treat other individuals online. This would coincide with NET*S standard 4 calling for teachers to model digital citizenship and responsibility (International Soceity for Technology in Education 2008)  I would also consider including textual harassment and sexting as a subsection of cyber bullying instead of as its own topic because much of the information overlaps. The whole section together could be called “online social interactions” or something like that.

If I were to teach this to my class, I would design the lesson in a similar fashion to how we did it in class. I would definitely have students research and present their findings. However, I would work closely with them to ensure they covered the right information and to the extent that I want them to. I would start off the lesson with some kind of anticipatory set such as an article about the consequences of cyber bullying or phishing. I would make them aware of how much of their life is now online and the risks associated with that.

With all this said, there are a couple changes I would make to the assignment. Firstly, I would spend time with the class at the beginning of the lesson to briefly define and discuss each topic so that everyone is on the same page as to what phishing or cyber bullying really is. I would cite some reputable sources such as legislation and government agencies in charge of digital safety. The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy is one such reputable source(The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy 2011). Their site provided good insight into technology and sex from different perspectives as well as interesting statistics on sexting and related material

In summation, I felt this was a good assignment that covered very important material and I would definitely want to present this material to my students in some fashion.

International Society for Technology in Education (n.d.) NETS teacher standards 2008.
            Retrieved from http://www.iste.org/standards/nets-for-teachers/nets-for-teachers-2008.aspx

The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy (2011). Retrieved from  http://www.thenationalcampaign.org/sextech/